Wave of moderate retirements could push Wisconsin more partisan

Mike Ellis considered among few willing to buck party

Feb. 5, 2014

Garey Bies

Tim Cullen

Disappearing breed

Four long-time moderate state lawmakers in Madison, two Democrats, and two Republicans, announced plans to retire after this session. One of them, Sen. Dale Schultz, R-Richland Center, was the lone GOP vote against Act 10 and drew the leadership’s scorn for his battle against the mining bill in northern Wisconsin. Sen. Tim Cullen, D-Janesville, broke rank with Democrats and attempted to bargain with Gov. Scott Walker over the collective bargaining bill, but also was among the 14 Democrats to leave the state in attempt to block a vote.

Bob Jauch

Dale Schultz / AP

Wisconsin State Capitol Building / Getty Images/iStockphoto

That’s the phrase boasted by extremes of the political spectrum in Wisconsin in recent years and is cause for alarm, outgoing moderate voices in Madison say.

After this session, longtime legislators Rep. Garey Bies, R-Sister Bay, Sen. Tim Cullen, D-Janesville, Sen. Bob Jauch, D-Poplar, and Sen. Dale Schultz, R-Richland Center will retire. They will take with them 94 years of old-school bridge-building political experience.

Schultz and Cullen were unsparing in their opinions when speaking to Gannett Wisconsin Media about what they say is a broken legislature dominated by special interest money and unreflective of an independent-minded electorate.

“There’s this attitude that legislators should only represent who voted for them,” Schultz said. “It breeds bitterness and misses the opportunity to come together.”

“This place is so dysfunctional and dominated by big campaign contributions,” Cullen said. “There’s a hunger in this state to act sensibly.”

Like Congress, where members of the two parties rarely agree on anything, Wisconsin’s legislature is about as divided as it has ever been.

That's the finding of Gannett Wisconsin Media statistical analysis of more than 1,500 votes in the Legislature over the past five years using data from the Sunlight Foundation’s Open States project.

The analysis showed the percentage of the time each lawmaker voted with every other lawmaker back to 2009.

For example, considering the 5,200 different vote pairings, in 2011 and 2012 the typical Republican agreed with a fellow Republican 98 percent of the time, and Democratic unity was 91 percent.

On average lawmakers in both parties voted with a member of the other party about 16 percent of the time, reflecting uncontroversial votes or rare glimmers of bipartisanship.

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Schultz voted with the typical Democrat nearly 30 percent of the time, the most of any GOP senator, the analysis shows.

His decision to retire came on the heels of a rare primary challenge from within the Republican party from Rep. Howard Marklein of Spring Green.

Going out as rabble rousers

Schultz, 60, and Cullen, 69 toured the state together in the wake of the Act 10 protests. They called for bipartisan compromise and an end to winner-take-all politics. They’ll step aside together this year as rabble rousers, but well-known pragmatists.

Sitting in his Capitol office under a portrait of Teddy Roosevelt, and adjacent to a giant black bear pelt, Schultz said he’s always tried to represent the entire 17th district in rural southwestern Wisconsin, regardless of his voters’ political affiliation.

Schultz laments the money from special interest groups that he says has tainted the already opaque legislative process.

He says the legislative systemrewards “political hitmen” who will pounce on any legislator who breaks from party unity. He said when he expressed views out-of-step with the party, interest groups flooded his office in recent years with robocalls and form emails.

Cullen blames the hyper-partisanship on redistricting and the Citizens United Supreme Court decision that allowed independent expenditures to flood state races.

“By the time a person gets here, as a freshman, they really have lost a lot of their freedom to govern,” Cullen said. “If you feel comfortable enough in your own skin to incur the wrath of the party leaders, you’ll do OK.”

Who is next?

Schultz, who voted with his Republican colleagues more than 90 percent of his career, has become a stunning pariah in the party based on only a few key votes, said Charles Franklin, a Marquette University Law professor and pollster.

“It’s an interesting example of how party unity — versus central issues that leadership considers critical — can overwhelm otherwise broad agreement,” Franklin said. “Even modest dissent within a unified party sticks out like a sore thumb.”

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So who’s the next sore thumb?

It may be Mike Ellis, the Republican senator from Neenah with enough clout and moxie to buck any directive, said Jay Heck, executive director for Common Cause in Wisconsin, a nonpartisan group that lobbies for good government and redistricting reform.

“Ellis has been that guy for years, especially on campaign finance reform,” Heck said. “He’s drifted recently to the right, but he basically can do anything he wants in this legislature. He could be the next major moderate voice.”

This year,Ellis faces his first election challenge since 1998. It will come from Appleton Democratic Rep. Penny Bernard Schaber.

Other Senate moderates that could fill the void are Sen. Luther Olsen, R-Ripon, and Sen. Robert Cowles, R-Green Bay, both known to show independent streaks, said Arnold Shober, a political science professor at Lawrence University in Appleton.

Olsen opposed Walker’s expansion of private voucher school programs and called for more accountability of all educational programs. Cowles voted for Act 10, but has a history of bipartisanship on issues like renewable energy. Both survived recall attempts in 2011.

Shober said the political landscape in Wisconsin and around the country has shifted enough that’s there’s little incentive to cater to moderate voters.

“Whoever replaces these moderates is unlikely to fulfill that same deal-making role,” Shober said. “We’ve become extremely polarized and candidates have to appeal to the far left or right for fundraising and policy.”

Ellis, challenger hear call for moderation

First elected in 1970, Ellis speaks in glowing terms of old compromise and says we need more relationships like that of President Ronald Reagan and Speaker Tip O’Neill, and fewer like the toxic Obama-Boehner match. He also blames the media “echo chamber” that shores up extreme partisan viewpoints, even on a state level.

“Here in Madison the left doesn’t want to move to the middle, and the right doesn’t want to move to the middle, but with (unified party control) we’re still getting things done,” Ellis said. “Assuming Republicans keep control, I don’t see us swinging to the middle. You may see some fracturing of the uniformity.”

Wisconsin is one of 23 Republican state government trifectas around the country. With Gov. Scott Walker leading the executive branch, Republicans hold a wide 60-39 majority in the Assembly and a closer 18-15 majority in the Senate.

Bernard Schaber said the divided Legislature is concerning, since even moderate adjustments to bills get stonewalled on partisan divides.

“The state’s recently-found surplus is a good example where you might hear some grumbling from the Senate Republicans, but they’ll fall in line and do what the governor says,” Bernard Schaber said. “The only way this process changes is if the public gets more involved and demand that their representatives be more reasonable.”